Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler's letters are to be published by Germany's Die
Welt

Heinrich Himmler’s love letters to his wife that also document the rise and fall of the Nazi regime are to be made public for the first time, it has been claimed.

Hundreds of the SS commander’s private letters, notes and photographs from 1927 to five weeks before his suicide in 1945 will be published byDie Weltnewspaper on Sunday.

The architect of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six million Jews, met his future wife Marga, who ran a nursing home in Berlin, in 1927. The letters apparently detail the early months of their relationship, with Himmler signing them “Dein Heini” (“Your Heini”).

But the correspondence between the couple apparently confirms the “not-so-glamorous private life of the Himmler family”.

The relationship started to break down from 1938 onwards, as Himmler had an affair with his private secretary, but contrary to biographers of the Reichsführer SS, he remained in touch with his wife and also wrote several times to his daughter, signing them off with “Euer Pappi” (“Your Daddy”).

The letters, which belonged to an Israeli family and are now in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, detail Himmler’s “immeasurable anti-Semitism and his obsessiveness” and are expected to provide a remarkable insight into the Nazi regime.

Michael Wildt, a German historian, described the find as “a dense body of private documents. There is nothing like it for any other member of the Nazi leadership.”

The documents were taken by US soldiers from a safe in the Himmler family home at the time when he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill while in British captivity at the end of the war, but it is not clear how they ended up in Israel.

Die Welt said the letters had been independently verified, quoting Michael Hollmann, president of the German Federal Archive, as stating: “We are sure about these documents. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents in Tel Aviv.”

A multi-million pound purchase of Hitler’s “diaries” in the 1980s was later shown to be an elaborate hoax, while Hermann Göring, his deputy, left virtually no personal records. The diaries of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, often focus on his own importance and projects.

“The documents do not change the overall picture of the Nazi reign of terror, but they certainly add countless previously unknown details and help [give] a better idea of what type of person the SS leader was, his everyday life and his surroundings,” according to Die Welt.